3. After all required details
have been entered, and the submitting taxonomist has indicated
that the name or nomenclatural act is ready to be officially registered,
the primary (master) ZooBank service will propagate the registration
entry data to all official replicate copies of the ZooBank database,
in the order of their established ranking [ranking would be determined
initially as simply the chronological sequence of established replicate
servers, but might be modified later as a function of historical
reliability of each replicate service]. Each official replicate
copy of the ZooBank service would, upon receiving and verifying
accuracy of the registration data, send a confirmation back to
the primary (master) service.
4. Once the primary (master) ZooBank
service has received sufficient confirmations of data replication,
the official date and time of registry would be assigned to the
registry record, and that date and time value would be propagated
(as described above) to all replicate copies of ZooBank.
5. After a registration entry
has received its official date and time of registry, the registration
procedure would be complete, and the registry entry would be made
available to the general public.
Considerations for Discussion:
We propose to establish a prototype of ZooBank, as a collaborative
project between ICZN, Zoological Record and the Global Biodiversity
Information Facility (GBIF). This will provide a voluntary registration
service as a proof of concept.
Clearly there are major overlaps with ZooBank in the information
content of ZR's Index of Organism Names (ION) and GBIF's Electronic
Catalogue of Names of Known Organisms (ECAT). The maximum compatibility
between these two databases and ZooBank needs to be aimed for.
With unique identifiers (reference code: e.g. DOI/GUID/LSID) appearing
with registered names in all three databases.
For the procedure described above,
amending the 4th Edition of the ICZN Code to only require mandatory
registration of traditionally published names and nomenclatural
acts, paper archiving of species descriptions will require resources
and space. ICZN is currently in discussions with the Library and
Information Services Department of the Natural History Museum (London,
UK) to see how such a facility might be jointly developed and funded.
Checking published descriptions against ZooBank registration entries
will also require additional resources. A business plan is presently
being developed to address funding issues.
For the situation described above, establishing the act of registration
as equivalent to the act of publication, careful consideration
must be given to all aspects of the revised, 5th Edition of the
ICZN Code establishing such a procedure.
Under either of these alternatives, the success of ZooBank will
depend largely on the willingness of taxonomists to register their
work with it. For this reason the registration process must be
uncomplicated, and third party registration must also be possible.
The three organisations working together on this project, ICZN,
GBIF and Thomson Zoological (producers of Zoological Record) will
exchange information on unregistered data, as well as alerting
authors. ZooBank will also provide an alerting service to authors
advising them by e-mail of changes in their groups of interest.
Extensive documentation and context-sensitive help features, written
in easy-to-understand language, will need to be developed and included
as an integral component of the ZooBank web site.
Both alternatives also require the resolution of many technical
details relating to data integrity assurance, perpetual access
(both in terms of continuous day-to-day access and long-term archival
access), replication and synchronization, and unique identifiers
used as registry keys. Of particular importance for the ZooBank
database is access security. The system must be open access such
that any taxonomist can register new names and nomenclatural acts
with minimal encumbrance. At the same time, the database must be
carefully safeguarded against malicious or unintentional hacking,
spurious registration entries, and other forms of “data vandalism”.
